Secondhand Souls (Grim Reaper 2)

“So bitey,” said another.

“Well, they loves y’all,” said the yellow fellow. “That’s why y’all are along.”

“Can they bite through this metal? because I don’t think I’m ready for the above?”

“No, not in the light. Not yet.”

“Macha, remember that time they almost tore you apart?”

“I’ma slow up a bit, ladies, so they stay close.”

A chorus of “No!” and “Oh, fuck no!” erupted from behind the seat.

Just yards behind, the hellhounds heard the voices, answered with enraged howls, and quickened their pace. The Buick jerked with impact, something hitting the rear, tearing metal, once, then again. The ladies in the dark screeched. The driver checked his side mirror and, finding it overflowing with angry dog face, slammed the accelerator to the floor, because while “them goggies might not be shit,” he did not particularly want to be proven wrong by being reduced to yellow specks in great piles of hellhound poo dropped across the Nevada desert.

“I want to make Salt Lake before they know what happened,” said the driver.

“What’s at Salt Lake?” asked one of the trunk voices.

“They’s a portal there that these motherfuckers don’t know about.”

“To the Underworld? We just got out of the Underworld.”

The yellow fellow chuckled. “Relax, ladies. We gonna dump these goggies in Salt Lake, keep ’em out of my business in San Francisco. I’ll have y’all back in some less portable darkness lickity-­split, then y’all can freshen up.”

“What about the child?” asked one of the voices.

“We cross that bridge when we get to it,” said the yellow fellow.

“She’s worse than the hounds.”

“Nemain!”

“Well, she is.”

“You know, it’s not so bad in here,” said Babd, changing the subject.

“Plenty of room. And it’s not damp.”

“And it’s warm.”

“You want,” said the driver, “y’all can stay there when we get back to the city. I get you some curtains and cushions and whatnot.”

He smiled to himself. Through many centuries and many incarnations, he had learned one universal truth: bitches love them some cushions.

They sped on, and after the two unfortunate bites, stayed just far enough ahead of Alvin and Mohammed so that from a distance, the hellhounds might appear to be particularly animated clouds of black smoke emitted from the tailpipes. They were creatures of fire and force, pursuing a yellow Buick with a creamy-­white top through the desert. Like many supernatural creatures, they winked in and out of the visible spectrum as they moved, so when a highway patrolman outside of Elko, Nevada, looked up from his radar readout, first he blinked, then he was tempted to radio up the road to his colleague and say, “Hey, did you just see two pony-­sized black dogs, doing seventy, pursuing a giant slice of lemon meringue pie?” Then he thought, No, perhaps I’ll keep that to myself.

About that same time, five hundred miles west, in the Mission District of San Francisco, a Buddhist nun and little crocodile-­wizard guy were working out the finer points of a murder.

“Is it really murder,” said Audrey, “if he is going to jump anyway?”

“I’m pretty sure it is,” said Charlie. “I think the Buddha said that one should never injure a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm. If we know he’s going to jump and we don’t stop him, I think we’re going against whatever sutra that is.”

“First, that is not a sutra, that’s Asimov’s First Law of Robotics, from I, Robot, and second, we’re not just allowing him to harm himself, we’re trying to get him to do it on a schedule.”

“I didn’t know Isaac Asimov was a Buddhist,” said Charlie. “Buddhist robots. Ha!”

“Asimov wasn’t. But the robots thing is close. I mean, you”—­ she was about to say, You are kind of a Buddhist robot, but instead she said, “You know those terra-­cotta warriors they found in China, buried since the second century B.C.? Those were kind of supposed to be Buddhist robots. The Emperor Qin Shi Huang was going to have a priest use the p’howa of forceful projection I used on the Squirrel ­People to put soldiers’ souls in the terra-­cotta soldiers, making himself an indestructible army. It might have worked if they’d filled them with meat.”